What is the Google Index? Why Indexing is the Foundation of Your SEO Strategy

As new websites come online, the number of websites in the Google index rises. There are almost 2 billion websites currently indexed in Google.

Since there are almost 2 billion websites in Google’s index, does that mean that is all the websites there are in the world?

Definitely not.

Not all websites are indexed by Google, and in fact, some websites that were once indexed are no longer indexed. These facts bring up questions about how to get into the index and what might cause you to be removed.

Google Index Defined

The Google index contains any website you can access through the Google search engine. If you go to Google and type a query for any given term, you’re likely to see hundreds of thousands of results. These results only show up because they are in Google’s index.

Your Site Must Be Indexed

If your site isn’t indexed, no amount of SEO can help you. Most of the time, it isn’t going to be difficult to get your site indexed. If you post it on social media and bookmark it through social bookmarking sites, you should be good to go.

Before Google’s Caffeine update, it could take days or even weeks for your website to show up in the search engine. Caffeine was designed to help legitimate websites get noticed sooner, so their searchers have access to as many valid websites as possible.

Your Backlinks Must be Indexed

A major part of a successful SEO campaign is backlinks. Did you know that your backlinks don’t help at all if they aren’t indexed by Google?

Backlinks are like votes. When backlinks aren’t in the Google index, Google can’t count them as a vote. You need to get them in the index before they can be of any use to your SEO campaign.

As you look through different SEO service options, you need to make sure they have a way to index your links. Posting your backlinks on sites that are already indexed by Google is only one of the ways you can get attention, so backlinks make it into the index.

Google web crawling takes place all day long so give it the opportunity to discover your links. Include your backlinks in RSS feeds, on Youtube video descriptions and more. Get creative, so the Google bot can find your webpage and start getting familiar with your website.

Want to Ensure Your Site is Indexed?

Of course, you want to ensure your website is in the Google index. If your site isn’t indexed by Google, then you won’t be able to get any website traffic to your site from this source.

One of the major parts of getting indexed is having a high-quality website that is easy for Google’s bot to crawl. Look through our work to see the quality of the sites we create. Don’t let your business get lost in the shuffle when we can help you shine.